Blank white page at WordPress Admin

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine who owns a business online had a very unpleasant surprise: the WordPress Admin page or sitename/wp-admin for his website was not available as usual, instead he got a scary blank white page every time he tried to log in. Trying to understand what had happened he examined his last actions and found out he had just updated the WordPress version, installed several plugins, and just before that he had installed a fancy theme for his website too.

Even though he had a few hypotheses, the main issue was that he couldn’t take back any of his last actions and, therefore, began to feel desperate… a blank white page doesn’t say too much, to be honest. He considered many options, but he was afraid he might cause bigger issues, so for that reason he decided to try a solution in case the theme was the root cause:

Log in cpanel to access the hosting admin sitename/cpanel

Scroll down to the Databases section and then click on phpMyAdmin

Locate our WordPress Database and look for the table named wp-options

Locate fields Template and Stylesheet. If by any chance there are too many fields and you never see an end, you can run a query to the database: go to Search and then type any of the words inside the text box on the far right of the option_name row. Repeat this step for both fields.

Click on Edit and then change any name inside the textbox for the word default.

Look at the bottom, make sure the option Save and then Go back to the previous page are selected. Click on Go.

When you’re done with the previous steps you’ll see nothing on your website; however, you’ll be able to log into the WordPress admin page again and take back the change you suspect caused everything or all of them. Save changes and check that everything is ok.

Sometimes plugins are the actual root cause, if you suspect that’s the case:

Log into cpanel, scroll down to the Files section and open the File Manager.

Expand wp-content/plugins folder and delete the folder related to the corresponding plugin.

We hope this tutorial to solve this inconvenience, do not hesitate to leave any comments or questions.